


Always Playing

by dizmo



Category: 4'33" - John Cage (Song)
Genre: Gen, Silence, Soundscapes, Vignettes, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:47:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dizmo/pseuds/dizmo
Summary: It's not about what people say it is.
Comments: 35
Kudos: 64
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Always Playing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



It's not about the silence. There is no silence.

If you have hearing, even a bit, you don't get silence.

Okay, yes, in the vacuum of space, with no air for sound to move through, you'll have silence. Pure, resolute silence, to be enjoyed for four and a half minutes (plus three seconds). Done and dusted. 

Although, in reality, you wouldn't be enjoying it for four and a half minutes. You wouldn't make it that long, exposed to the vacuum of space. So you'd get the abridged version. Fifteen seconds, give or take, before a very different kind of silence. But enjoyment would probably not exactly be what you were experiencing.

So you'd need a space suit.

And then you're basically back to the same issue as on earth.

There is no silence.

Because it's not about the silence.

The silence is a canvas for sound.

Tiny sounds are what you get in silence. The sussuration of the blood in your ears, the soft whispers of your breathing. A quiet steady heartbeat.

And those are just the background notes. If you're perfectly still, and perfectly alone, those are the beat, the rhythm of the silence.

In a silent crowd? Those background notes are amplified. 

Muted sounds of shifting, of the fabric of clothing moving against itself. Of weight shifting on chairs.

The crowd isn't silent if you really listen. 

A performance of this piece is a formality, really. It is the everyday, muted, distilled, and placed in a concert hall to a rapt audience who knows exactly what they're about to get.

But since there is no silence, the piece, really, is played everywhere. All the time. Four minutes and thirty three seconds, three hundred sixteen (and a bit) times a day.

A man stands in the kitchen of his highrise apartment, cooking some bacon for breakfast. The distant sounds of construction from renovations to the building down the block filter his way. He adds an egg to the sizzling pan. Far below him, the cacophany of traffic means morning commutes are well on the way. But then, so is his breakfast. There's a lot of noise, much of it discordant, but in its way, it's four and a half minutes of music.

A baby sleeps. swaddled in her crib. Her mother walks into the room, her bare feet making quiet steps on the carpet. She remains quiet, not wanting to wake her daughter, whose soft breathing burbles out of her. A bird sings on the other side of the nursery window while a sprinkler waters the lawn below it. A quiet moment, and a happy one, but not entirely silent. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds, treasured.

A fan works on her exchange fic. She was very excited about the assignment and is now wondering if she's drifting a bit too meta as the writing continues. Her fingers hit the keys in a sharp staccato. The heater turns on in the hallway, covering up the whirring of the fans on the computer tower beside her. It will take a few runs through the piece before the story is done, but not a single one of them will sound exactly the same, for all their similarities.

A cat pads down the hallway in an otherwise empty house. He makes his way into the living room and to his cat tree. He reaches up and rakes his claws down the sisal rope encasing the main column. A few leaps up have him ascending to the top platform, where he stares out the window at some buzzing insects. He purrs, content, his ears flicking at the slightest sound. His humans will be home soon, but for these four minutes, he soaks in the solitude of an unwitting performance. 

An airliner hums its way over the Atlantic in the middle of the night for yet another red-eye. The cabin is mostly still, pressurized air circulating through. The passengers are largely asleep, with a few who are unable to reading, or scrolling through their phones, or doing just about anything to keep themselves occupied while not waking their far-too-close neighbors. A few soft snores drift through the air. More than a hundred encore performances play to a mostly-unconscious audience. 

A melancholy college freshman sits in a dorm room, staring out the window. Thunder rumbles in the distance and raindrops snap sharply against the window. He sips rapidly cooling coffee from a mug sitting at his desk as distant lightning flashes hit his vision. His phone vibrates on his nightstand. He ignores it and continues to stare out into the rain. Every few minutes seem like a lifetime.

A harsh winter wind blows through a dark snow-covered forest, swirling around the bare branches of dormant trees. The wind goes by a cabin where a couple sits curled together by the crackling fireplace, drinking warm cider and basking in one another's presence. No words are exchanged. There don't have to be. They cuddle and have one another as shields against the cold. An evening full of quiet performances, four-odd minutes at a time.

A few dozen teenagers sit in a large room, concentrating on a standardized test. Number two pencils scratch across paper, and well-used desks creak as the students shift and fidget while they continue filling in circles that will, to a degree, determine their futures. A clock on the wall quietly but inexorably ticks down each second (two hundred and seventy-three times, over and over). It's quiet, but their minds are screaming.

A runner jogs along a beach at dawn, shoes pounding against wet sand. The tide is low and the waves rumble against the shore. Overhead, seabirds wheel and call, squabbling over fish. The runner's breath comes in sharp bursts, heartrate rising, but she soldiers on. The world is waking around her as she tracks her own performance, mostly unaware of the other performance that surrounds her every few minutes.

An old car makes its way through a barren desert. It's been well over an hour since the last town, and it will be even longer before the next. The car radio gave up miles ago, finding just static on every frequency before the driver just turned it off, leaving just the hum of the engine in the background. There will be many miles to go along this highway before the trip ends, traveling at about five and a third miles every four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

Every vignette is a performance of the piece. And every performance of the piece is a vignette. A brief window into a moment. The universe writes the music, as time continues on, four minutes and thirty-three seconds at a time. The composer wrote that music down. Three movements.

_Tacet._

_Tacet._

_Tacet._

Silence is golden.

Sound is golden, too.


End file.
